Essays on the economics, politics and finance of infrastructure

The main idea of this thesis is to study three different issues, economic, political, or financial, related to three different public infrastructure sectors, transport, water and sewerage, and electricity, by using three different methodological approaches. In the first chapter, I make creative use of a non-parametric technique traditionally used to measure the relative efficiency of a set of similar firms, data envelopment analysis, to identify the most likely objective, economic vs. political, behind a specific policy. In the second chapter I empirically investigate the effects of the increasing private financial ownership of the water and sewerage utilities in England and Wales on key outcome variables such as leverage levels and consumer bills. Finally, in the third chapter, I evaluate an equity-aimed policy introduced in the electricity sector in Spain in 2009 by measuring the effect of its introduction on the probability of a household of being energy poor.Chapter One – Unbundling political and economic rationality: a non-parametric approach tested on transport infrastructure in SpainThis paper suggests a simple quantitative method to assess the extent to which public investment decisions are dominated by political or economic motivations. The true motivation can be identified by modeling each policy goal as the focus of the optimization anchoring a data envelopment analysis of the efficiency of the observed implementation. In other words, we rank performance based on how far observed behavior is under each possible goal, and the goal for which the distance is smaller reveals the specific motivation of the investment or any policy decision for that matter. Traditionally, data envelopment analysis is used to measure the relative efficiency of a set of firms having a similar productive structure. In this case, each firm corresponds to a different policy year, the policy being the determinant of the investment made.The approach is tested on Spain’s land transport infrastructure policy since it is argued by many observers to be driven more by political than economic concerns, resulting in a mismatch between capacity investment and traffic demand. History has shown that when the source of financing has been private, the network has been developed in areas with high demand, i.e. the Northern and Mediterranean corridors. When the source has been public, the network has been developed following a radial pattern, converging from a to Madrid. The method clearly shows that public investments in land transport infrastructure have generally been more consistent with a political objective – the centralization of economic power – than with an economic objective – maximizing mobility –.Chapter Two – On the effects of the private financial ownership of regulated utilities: lessons from the UK water sectorThis paper analyzes the quantitative impact of the growing role of non-traditional financial actors in the financing structure and consumer pricing of regulated private utilities. The focus is on the water sector in England and Wales, where the effect of the firms’ corporate financing and ownership strategies on key outcome variables may have been underestimated. The sector was privatized in 1989, year in which the 10 regional monopolies became 10 water and sewerage companies, listed and publicly traded on UK Stock Exchanges. Since then, six of the ten have been de-listed, bought-out by private equity – investment and infrastructure funds. I make use of this variation in ownership to measure the effect on leverage levels and consumer bills.I develop a theoretical framework allowing me to derive two hypotheses: first, the buyout of a company increases its leverage level, and second, the buyout of a company increases the consumer bill through higher leverage levels. The empirical analysis is based on two sequential steps: a staggered difference-in-differences estimation shows that private equity buyouts increase the leverage levels of water utilities. An instrumental variable and two-stage least squares estimation then show that these higher leverage levels increase the average consumer bills of bought-out utilities more than if they had not been bought-out. The estimated impact of the private equity buyouts in the sector in England and Wales on the annual average consumer bill ranges from 13.5 to 32.6 GBP, for a sample average bill of about 427 GBP.Chapter Three – Understanding the effectiveness of the electricity social rate in reducing energy poverty in SpainThis paper analyzes the causal impact of the introduction of a social subsidy, the bono social de electricidad, in Spain's electricity market in 2009. The measure was introduced following the surge in energy poverty, increasing particularly after the financial crisis. Using data from the family budget survey from 2006 to 2017, we evaluate the social policy in its fight against energy poverty.We proceed in two steps. First, we use a difference-in-differences approach to measure such a causal impact and to analyze how the introduction of the measure directly affected eligible households. We find that the introduction of the subsidy has reduced the likelihood of energy poverty for the eligible households. Therefore, the bono social de electricidad has reached its equity objective of increasing affordability of electricity. The second step aims at understanding how specifically the introduction of the subsidy affects consumers. We find that, in reaction to lower effective prices, households do not increase their consumption of electricity, resulting in lower total electricity expenditure. We are therefore able to show that this policy did not induce a change in the consumption behavior and that the increased affordability entirely resulted in a decrease of expenditure in electricity